June 4 – this day in history

Right from destination weddings to air safaris, the hot air balloons have added fun, frolic and a lot of colours to our lives since their invention. The earliest recorded instance of a balloon carrying humans used hot air to produce buoyancy and was built by two brothers named Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier in Annonay, France. Both of these brothers belonged to a family of paper manufacturers and got the idea when they had noticed ash rising in paper fires. The Montgolfier brothers gave the first public demonstration of their invention on June 4, 1783. The flight of the “montgolfière” lasted only about 10 minutes, but it secured the French inventors a place in the history books.

Here are other reasons which establish June 4 as a memorable date in history:

• 1896 – Henry Ford takes his 1st Ford through streets of Detroit.
• 1911 – Gold was discovered in Alaska’s Indian Creek
• 1917 – First Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Richards & Elliott.
• 1929 – Founder of the Eastman Kodak Company George Eastman demonstrates 1st technicolour movie (Rochester NY)
• 1936 – Nutan, one of India’s leading film actresses from yesteryear, was born on 4 June 1936 to filmmaker Kumarsen Samarth and actress-producer Shobhna Samarth.
• 1939 – The first shopping cart was introduced by Sylvan Goldman in Oklahoma City.
• 1941 – Nazis prohibited Jews access to beaches and swimming pools.
• 1944 – U505 became the first German submarine captured & boarded on high seas
• 1944 – The United States Army entered Rome during World War II, which leads to the liberation of the city.
• 1958 – French Premier Charles de Gaulle arrived in Algiers
• 1964 – Constitution was adopted in Maldives.
• 1969 – Beatles release Ballad Of John & Yoko/Old Brown Shoe, in the US
• 1974 – Sally Murphy became the first woman to qualify as an aviator with the US Army
• 1975 – The oldest animal fossils were found in the United States.